News story: Protecting information from an insider threat

War Hero

Technology company, Ripjar, is looking at new ways to protect an organisation’s data and cyber systems from an insider threat. This threat is the risk posed by someone who legitimately works at an organisation, but who has dishonest intentions - namely to collect sensitive, internal information and to pass it on.

Ripjar, which is based near Cheltenham, has a background in intelligence, and is focussed on getting insights from large-scale data sets. It received funding from the Centre for Defence Enterprise to develop its prototype system to mitigate the insider threat.

Chief Executive Officer Tom Griffin said:

The funding from CDE has allowed us to pursue exciting, high-risk tech innovations that wouldn’t have otherwise been feasible for our small company.​

Ripjar monitors the typical web accesses made by employees and looks for staff members who behave in a significantly different way to their peers, or who suddenly change their behaviour. If such an event occurs, an alert is triggered that provides enough details for a security officer to conduct further investigations. This approach considers the rate of web accesses and the content viewed to build up a detailed profile of how individuals within organisations behave. The system learns and adapts to the data presented to it – without making any assumptions.